


A way to the redemption I've been looking for

by Sidney Sussex (SidneySussex)



Category: Avengers (Comic), Captain America (Comics), The Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:55:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/340136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SidneySussex/pseuds/Sidney%20Sussex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Bucky saved someone from themselves, and the one time someone beat him at his own game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A way to the redemption I've been looking for

**Author's Note:**

> _I neither own nor profit from any of these characters; they are the property of Marvel Entertainment, LLC._
> 
> _If you see something that you think ought to be changed or improved, please feel free to let me know, if you'd like. Constructive criticism is always welcome. (And yeah, I totally mix and mash up the comics and the movie 'verse, and play around with timelines a little. Sorry.)_
> 
> _A/N: Inspired by[ImpishTubist](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ImpishTubist/) and enabled by The Feels. You guys are going to be the death of me, but it will be the happiest death I've ever had._
> 
> _Also, Bucky is stitched together from fragments of about ten different incarnations of the character. I mess with stuff. Please don't kill me._

 

**I. Steve Rogers**

He recognizes the sound of it before he ever even figures out what direction it's coming from. He's not sure how to feel about the fact that he knows exactly what it sounds like when some thug's fist connects with the side of Steve's face. It's good that he knows, though, because it means he can do this, show up at the end of the alleyway primed and ready to throw down.

His first punch lands exactly where he wants it to, just like it always does. The second one goes wide, but that's because the guy he hit is already falling, and just like that, the fight is over before it's even really started.

Steve grins up at him through split lips, wiping the back of his hand across his face to clear away the blood that's pouring from his nose. He doesn't so much _clear away_ as _spread around_ , and Bucky sighs and rolls his eyes and digs a forgotten handkerchief out of Steve's back pocket. "Use this."

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Steve says, taking the handkerchief but waving away Bucky's hand. "I coulda had him on the ground if I'd had a couple more minutes."

"Sure you could," Bucky agrees amiably. Truth is, it bothers him more than he can say to see Steve like this, sweat mixing with the blood on his face, dishevelled hair hanging in his eyes, clothes torn and dirtied with back-alley stains Bucky doesn't want to try identifying. Steve's problem is that he never knows when to back down; he has a few marks and scars by now attesting to that fact, and Bucky has cause to remember it once or twice a week himself, rubbing iodine over scraped knuckles and nursing the occasional bruise. He wishes Steve knew his own limits, but then again, the fact that he doesn't is probably a large part of the reason Bucky likes him.

"You think maybe next time you can get him on the ground a little faster?" Bucky asks, rubbing his sore hand with the other. "It's awful hard to keep chasing around after you like this."

Steve grins. "Next time I'll have him out cold before you even notice I'm gone."

Bucky wants to say, _There better not be a next time_ , but who is he kidding, anyway? This is Steve they're talking about; of course there's going to be a next time. And Bucky's going to be there, and he's going to have to knock some sense into someone, and maybe it should be Steve he knocks the sense into one of these days, but he doesn't.

He ruffles Steve's hair, because he knows Steve hates that. "Come on," he says. "We're gonna miss the movie."

 

**II. Captain America**

He has friends.

Of course Captain America has friends; everyone in the country is Captain America's friend. But these are _real_ friends, ones he can spar with in the gym without having to pull every punch, ones he can relax with after a successful mission, ones he can turn to when he needs to ask for help.

He has friends, and he's not sure how he feels about that.

Because he has dreams, too, about the last time he had friends. Dreams about the people he used to care about, the ones who swore they'd always have his back. Dreams about what happened to them all, and sometimes dreams that never happened but _could have_ , and in his dreams, he doesn't stop the things that never happened, and he watches them die, one by one or all together, and does nothing. He loses them, loses them all, and never gets them back.

He has friends, but he wishes he didn't.

Friends are too easy to lose. They're too easy to place in harm's way; they're too easy to make vulnerable simply because they associate with Captain America. They're too willing to give up their own lives to make sure the legend lives on, and he can't handle any more of that on his conscience. Not with the Red Skull back; not with this new, strange, sharp-edged world and its darkness and its technology and its gleeful love of weaponry and blood. Not when he could lose more of them, lose them all, and never get them back.

He's been asleep for most of the last seventy years, and still, he thinks, he's lived for far too long.

He pays less attention to what's going on around him these days, because he can't get too attached. He needs to be in this world, but not a part of it, so that no one will ever follow him again when he takes risks. It's dangerous to go out on assignment this way, but no one wants to be the one to decommission Captain America, and he hides it well. He takes on missions, completes them, and no one dies for him; everyone comes back after they're finished, and that works. It's enough.

He doesn't show it, but he is still startled every time they all come back. It wasn't like that, once.

On the day Sharon is kidnapped, it seems almost as though his life is falling back into the patterns he knows best. He fights it, tells himself, _They come back now_ , and goes to save her, and he bites down hard on the inside of his lip to stop himself from thinking about anything else.

Not falling. Not cold. Not blood on uniforms and gunfire he can't trace and figures dwindling in the distance in his head, in his dreams, in his past. He is not thinking about those things.

And then his past comes to meet him instead, blindsides him with a blow to the head, destroys a city and a hundred innocent people, and _no_ , this is wrong. He's falling, drowning, and this isn't what he meant when he wished for the dreams to stop. No nightmare has ever prepared him for the dead look in the Winter Soldier's eyes as he levels the gun.

 _Shoot me_ , he begs, and not only with his words.

The Winter Soldier shoots, and misses, and it isn't a mistake.

His friend is still in there somewhere.

He grabs desperately for a thread of communication, whispers, " _Remember who you are_ ," and clutches the Cube white-knuckled so that its edges cut into the skin of his fingers.

_Remember._

_Come back._

He doesn't stay. He doesn't stay, but the man who leaves the field of battle that day is not the Winter Soldier. It's Bucky Barnes, despite the harsh glint of the metal arm, despite the haunted look in hooded eyes, despite the broad, red star across his shoulders. It's Bucky Barnes, and he's come back, and even though he doesn't stay, for the first time in seventy years, Steve breathes and his lungs don't fill with the dust of a long-finished war.

He doesn't know where Bucky is, but he knows that his friend is not gone.

Sometimes they do come back.

 

**III. Nick Fury**

Nick Fury takes pride in his army career, but he is not proud of it.

He keeps a photograph on his desk and several more stashed in a bottom drawer nobody can get into without a key. Sometimes he picks it up, when things are troubling him more than they usually do, and traces the outlines of the ragtag band of soldiers with one index finger. He can name them all, but he never thinks of them that way. There's Dum Dum (and Nick will be _damned_ if he can ever remember _that_ man's real name), but he just thinks about impressive moustache and impressive marksmanship and the way Dum Dum looked when he took out his first Hydra operative in a forest. There's Jacques, who was 'Frenchie' in the war and loved to get himself captured by the other side, but who sniffed out an infiltrator before any of them and saved the whole unit and more besides. There's the kid, Bucky (and that's not _his_ real name, either), standing next to Captain Rogers and looking pleased as punch, though he's obviously trying _not_ to look that way.

Nick takes pride in his men, and he takes pride in the work they've done, but he's not proud that it was necessary at all. War ruins people, and he knows it better than most.

This is why he wants the Avengers Initiative. With enough superhumans on guard, maybe ordinary folk won't need to be the heroes anymore.

He doesn't like to talk about what happened to them all.

Not the ones who died. They got off easy. It's the ones who lived who hover in the back of his consciousness, ghosts of a fate not quite like dying, but not so different, either. It's the tic Dum Dum developed in the corner of his mouth, the way his days are regimented now, up-at-six-five-mile-run-lunch-at-noon-bed, because he learnt it in the war and never shook the habit. It's the nervous tapping of Jacques' foot against the floor and the way his eyes skate around the room at every sound, checking to see who's hiding and who's coming to get him. It's the dozens and dozens of men who went missing in action, eventually declared dead _in absentia_ , but with no way, no way to know for sure.

Nick is starting to worry about the Initiative, because the longer he works on it, the more he sees his own Howling Commandos in it. The more he realizes that, super strength or fancy metal suit or Soviet espionage training, these are just people, too. People who have weaponry beyond a shotgun or a sniper rifle, one or two steps past grenades and bayonets and riot control gas, but still people, and this time, they're fighting a different kind of war.

Nick still hasn't been forgiven for the first one.

He thinks about it more than he'll admit (he admits nothing, which makes the sweeping declaration easy). He's thinking about it when they spread the photographs in front of him, when he watches video footage and calmly blanks his facial expression, when Sharon says to him, softly, that the man ( _man_ , and the few glimpses of his face they almost get would seem to bear that out, but the metal arm that burns in the cold wind would seem to argue), that the Winter Soldier, looked like Bucky Barnes.

Bucky is – was – one of the lost ones. One of the ones who went out and never came back, except that there was no waiting for his declaration of death; a combination bomb-and-plane-crash seemed to be enough circumstantial evidence for even the United States Army to write him off sight unseen.

To be honest, Nick thought he was one of the ones who got off easy, too.

But here he is, standing in Nick's office looking barely older than he does in the old photograph (cryostorage is a hell of a thing). The metal arm is missing and the lines of his face are deep and dark under a few days' growth of beard; he may be young in body, but his soul is much, much older than Bucky Barnes' once was.

Nick gives him what he asks for. There's no way he can refuse, sitting here behind this desk with all the trappings of a life lived – not perfectly, perhaps, but _lived_ , which is more than Bucky and Steve and most of the people Nick deals with on a daily basis are able to claim. No way he can turn his back on this man-who-was-Bucky, not any more than he could turn his back on the man who is what Dum Dum became, or Jacques, or any veteran Nick sees in the streets when he walks by and tries to act like he understands why they ended up where they are and he ended up in a nice office at S.H.I.E.L.D. riding herd on a whole new set of Howling Commandos.

War ruins people in a lot of ways that aren't death, and Nick Fury is pretty sure that most of them are worse.

When the Winter Soldier comes to work for S.H.I.E.L.D., he braces himself for it. He's expecting darkness from his former war comrade (no, comrade is a bad word, don't use that); he's expecting psychological scars worse than the physical ones. He's seen recovered agents before, and he knows the trauma intimately. He's lost men to it before.

What he gets, though, is a steady, taciturn man who keeps his scars well-hidden. He gets a man who blinks away shame and self-doubt and does as he is told. He gets a man who completes assignments with quiet efficiency, never once letting the origins of what he is define him.

He gets a man who shows up in his office one day, completely off-the-record (Nick's office is always off the record unless he says otherwise), and asks him how he's doing. Sure, he growls it out in a gruff imitation of resentment, and he doesn't look at Nick while he asks, but he asks. Nick's response is, "I'm supposed to be the one asking you that," and neither one of them actually answers the question, which is probably for the best.

He gets the occasional hesitant smile, caught over mission surveillance or on the mansion's video feeds when no one (or no one but Steve) is looking. He gets a sarcastic crack over the radio when he's not expecting it (he thinks, for a moment, that it's Clint), and then another during one of Steve's team briefings, and a third at breakfast in the heli-carrier cafeteria. Bucky was never really a joker – always so earnestly the consummate soldier – but then again, this isn't exactly the Bucky Nick knew.

It's Bucky, though.

It's Bucky, and he's been through war and imprisonment and hell, but he's come out on the other side. Maybe he checks rooms before he walks into them. Maybe his fingers (metal, flesh) curl strangely at his sides when they're not wrapped around a gun. Maybe he can disarm a fully-trained S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in twenty seconds. But he also remembers how to smile, crack jokes, how to lounge on the couch in the rec room and give Nick sass when he's supposed to be training. He remembers war and the Winter Soldier, but he also remembers who he is.

War ruins people, but Nick thinks maybe Bucky is only changed and not destroyed. It's a strange thought, given guilt and mistrust and inadequacy and a metal arm, but maybe, he thinks, Bucky might be one of the lucky ones.

Maybe he might be, too.

 

**IV. Bruce Banner**

Bucky doesn't really sleep much anymore. It's not a problem for him or anything, despite the nightmares that visit him when he does; it's just that he kind of thinks he's slept enough for one lifetime. And maybe he's a little bothered by the jolt when he wakes up and his first instinct is, _По вашей команде, сэр_ , before he remembers and everything shifts in the darkness. But that's okay, too, not a problem. He's getting used to it.

Being awake in the middle of the night is not all bad, though. Sometimes Steve will be up, too, and they'll spar in the basement and Steve will laugh and Bucky will take the fall and Steve will jab and Bucky will feint to one side and catch the blow on his right arm, always his right, never the left, and it'll be almost like it once was. Sometimes Tony will be up, and Bucky will stand out of sight behind the entrance to his workshop and watch as he designs and discards, welds metal with wreaths of living fire, takes hold of scattered pieces of scrap iron and turns them into something whole and good and worthy, and he doesn't think about the symbolism of that at all.

Sometimes the light will be on in Dr. Banner's lab, and then Bucky goes there and sits on the edge of the cot in the corner and stays silent (soldier, sniper; he is very good at silence) while Bruce works magic with letters and numbers and tiny, delicate bottles of chemicals. He wishes, sometimes, when Bruce's face lights up with wonder at some miniscule trace or signal Bucky cannot see, that he knew something about science. He wishes he knew which bottles to mix together to see that amazement in Bruce's eyes, to be a part of a pleasure that innocent again.

But Bruce is not innocent of the world, either, and Bucky is brutally reminded of that when he walks into the lab one night expecting cheerful, distracted technobabble he can lose himself in without understanding, and instead finds Bruce in Bucky's usual spot on the cot, pale and drawn, fingers shaking in a way that says there won't be any experiments done tonight.

He sits, close enough that their shoulders brush (his right, always his right, never the left), and says nothing. It's been a difficult week for everyone, and Bruce has had to resort to the Hulk more times than he would like. Bucky knows he's been getting more comfortable with his other form, but – well – he also knows that undergoing that kind of change is never, ever easy.

"Tough to come back," he says, breaking the silence.

Bruce looks at him like he has no idea what Bucky's talking about, then nods, once, stiffly.

"I was a monster for a while, y'know," Bucky continues, almost conversationally, except not, because the words fall heavy from him. It's still difficult to think about, the blankness and the nonexistence under the weight of that word, _monster_.

It's a while before Bruce answers, and when he does, he says, "You came back."

"I'm still coming back."

Silence again.

Bruce slings an arm around him, pats him awkwardly on the shoulder (his left, and Bucky flinches but doesn't shift away, because this is about Bruce's reassurance and not his).

He grins, and it takes away the gravity of their words. "Hey," he says, "will you show me that thing with the light rays again?"

"The perturbative multi-photon regime?"

"Uh, yeah. That."

"Sure," says Bruce, and it's probably not what he was planning to do with his night, but his hands are shaking less now and he's back to lecturing on things Bucky will never understand, and that's kind of what Bucky was going for, so everything is fine, or it will be.

 

**V. Clint Barton**

They're lying on their stomachs on a hillside, Bucky with his rifle trained on something barely visible, Clint with his bow sideways against the grass, muttering darkly because he hates using it this way. Not good for it, he says, and plays hell with your shooting form as well.

"Why are we even here?" he says into the quiet grey of early morning, and even though his voice is pitched low and so soft it won't carry, Bucky winces. He knows the first rule of their line of work: _you don't talk on assignment. It'll give away your position._ Not that Agent Coulson hasn't warned him about Clint's inability to grasp the concept of radio silence, but it's different when they're actually out in the field and it might endanger them.

"Shh," he replies, because he's afraid that if he doesn't, Clint is going to talk more.

It doesn't help. Clint talks more anyway.

"They don't need us here," he says. "They're just taking care of the whole thing themselves."

"We're covering their backs," Bucky points out in a low whisper. "You've been a sniper for how long?"

Clint shrugs. "I don't know why," he says, and returns his gaze to the scene in front of them.

They finish up without further conversation (Bucky is grateful, though as soon as the operation is finished and their noise ban lifted, he finds he misses the companionable timbre of Clint's voice), retreat to the armoury, and begin cleaning and disassembling their respective weapons side-by-side.

"You're fast," Clint says, impressed.

"Been doing this for…" Bucky trails off, tries to think of a way to end that sentence. "A while now."

"I guess," says Clint. "That's good."

"This helps," Bucky adds, tapping the arm. He normally tries to call as little attention to it as possible, but he thinks he can see what's going on here, and maybe it'll help to remind Clint that he has a little help in doing what he does. The reaction speed of the joints in the hand does speed up his field-stripping and cleaning; it's strong, too, and that's always an asset.

Clint looks at it funny, quirks an eyebrow. "Shoots lightning, right?"

"Uh, yeah, it… it does that."

"Must be fun," he says, "being half Captain America, half Iron Man."

Bucky's not either of those things. He can't imagine ever being worthy of comparison to Steve, and Tony – well, he's _Tony_. He's all glamour and genius, hidden inadequacies and half-buried weaknesses, and Bucky is pretty sure there's nobody else like him in the world, electrical energy pulse weapon or no.

"Look, I… I get it," he says, laying down his gun. "It sucks being the guy with the good aim on a team of superheroes."

Clint blinks. He looks like he's about to protest, say, _That isn't what I said_ , but Bucky knows better. That's all he's been saying all day.

"You don't think I ever figured that out?" he asks. "Sidekick to Captain America and his band of merry men? Being 'that kid' in the middle of a war that everybody else was winning while I watched?"

There's a confused look through the fringe of hair that Clint really should have cut; it's going to get in the way of his vision, which is not ideal for a marksman. "That's not how it was," he says. "All the stories, the comic books… Steve always talks about the stuff you did."

"I didn't do anything," Bucky says. "Shot a few Hydra agents. Nothing else."

"Not to hear Steve tell it," Clint argues. "From what he says, you were pretty hot stuff. 'Always had his back' and 'never missed a shot' and 'war wouldn't have gone the same way for us without him.'"

Bucky's stunned. Steve says those things about him?

When he can speak again, he says, "He's lying – exaggerating – and I did miss. Just not very often."

"Never seen you miss."

"You, either."

Clint makes a kind of half-shrugging gesture. "Yeah, well. 's what I'm here for." He doesn't need to add the unspoken, _all I'm here for_. Bucky hears it anyway.

"Hey," he offers, and Clint's hand stills against the bowstring he's waxing. "All those things Steve said about me? I never knew about any of it."

"Now you do," Clint says, with an unmistakeable air of, _yeah, and?_

Bucky says, "Bet you have no idea what they say about you, either."

He's expecting the headshake. The Avengers are pretty much all idiots, and Bucky is betting heavily that no one's realized Clint might want to _hear_ this.

There's a brief, understated conversation with Steve, in which Bucky is very careful with his words and at the same time tries very hard to look as though he isn't being. The next morning, Steve drops a hand onto Clint's shoulder as he eats breakfast, and maybe there are a few words exchanged; Bucky sees, but doesn't hear. Tony comes up from his workshop around lunchtime, and there's a new cam adjustment system for the compound bow, and Tony definitely says something, but Bucky's pretty sure it's just about the way the cams are synchronized, so he counts it as half a win. And then there's Bruce and Thor and even Fury gives Clint a nod as he stalks his way through the cafeteria, and Clint is trying very, _very_ hard not to look pleased (okay, thrilled), but he's not really succeeding.

Yeah, Bucky gets it, all right. And this time, maybe Clint will, too.

 

**\+ I. Lieutenant Colonel James Rupert Rhodes**

"… yeah, I guess he likes that kind of thing. Says it's inspiring or something."

He rounds the corner in time to see Tony nodding seriously – not the way he does whenever Rhodey says anything, false gravity in his eyes and corner of his mouth twitching like he can't stand having to suppress his laughter, but with actual sincerity. He's _listening_ to Barnes.

Rhodey shakes his head. He might outrank the younger (older?) man, but technically, Barnes has seniority. He's actually not entirely sure how these things work, but he knows that he owes Barnes his respect. And his thanks. It's not often he has the chance to thank someone like Barnes in person; usually, he's standing at parade rest in front of a memorial, a headstone, a commemorative plaque.

He doesn't let it show in his eyes, but standing in the presence of Bucky Barnes, Rhodey is a little overwhelmed.

Tony reaches out, claps Barnes on the back (hard, but the soldier doesn't let it shift his position an inch) and leaves. Barnes drops his face into one hand, shaking his head, but also smiling, and Rhodey is pretty sure he can guess the kind of advice Tony was soliciting. After all, he's already been to pump everyone else, Rhodey included, for information.

"I think he's building up a repertoire."

Barnes flinches just a fraction, only concession to his unawareness of Rhodey's presence, and looks questioningly at him.

"Steve, right? That's what he was asking you about?"

A brief nod.

"Yeah, he's already asked all of us the same questions."

"Whether you're sleeping with him?"

Rhodey is a little taken aback, but he shouldn't be. It kind of figures that was Tony's first question.

"Maybe not that one."

"I'm not, for the record."

"Didn't think you were. Tony's not exactly on the same wavelength as other people."

"Yeah, I'm getting that."

They share a sideways kind of laugh, two men whose demeanours are strict and military in each other's presence, but whose situations are so far from typical that they're not even sure how to approach this conversation.

"You do a lot of that," Rhodey comments, because he's seen.

"A lot of what?"

"A lot of giving other people what they need."

"Please," says Barnes, " _please_ tell me this doesn't end in a cheesy pick-up line. Because I like you, Rhodes, but…"

"Rhodey," he corrects, "and no. Thanks, but… no."

"Bucky," says the man in front of him, and seems to stand a little taller when he says it. _Bucky_ , Rhodey thinks, trying it out, and he likes it a lot better than _Barnes_ , and a hell of a lot better than _Winter Soldier_.

He doesn't think Bucky likes 'Winter Soldier' any better than Rhodey likes 'War Machine.' Their mantles are what they are, and both of them wear them well, but Rhodey is pretty sure he senses a kindred spirit here, both of them shaped into what they are without much choice.

"Bucky," he nods. "So, your lookout and mine, huh?"

Bucky shakes his head. "Steve doesn't need me to look out for him anymore," he says. "He's got all – this." His wave encompasses the whole of the workshop, the mansion, the Avengers. Steve has moved on far, far beyond the scrawny kid Bucky once defended in back alleys.

Or at least, that's how Rhodey's betting Bucky sees it. He supposes Tony's mansion is pretty impressive, if you're not used to it. Then again, the entire twenty-first century must be pretty impressive. Bucky hasn't been asleep for seventy years the way Steve has, but he hasn't exactly been awake, either.

It hits him that _this_ is also something Bucky hasn't had, this network of people ready to catch him if he falls, this legion of allies to call on if he needs a hand. For the last seventy years, the choice for him has been between succeeding alone and dying.

Maybe he's been doing a little of both.

Rhodey's a man of action, and when he decides something, he follows through on it. And he's just decided that Bucky is done with that. Maybe he's going to keep being sent out on missions; maybe he's going to keep watching the Avengers from the outside without ever really reaching out to them; maybe he's going to stay simultaneously wisecracking and close-mouthed, an open secret, there for anyone to read while no one dares even to try. Maybe.

But he's not going to do it alone.

"Hey, Bucky," he says. "I'm gonna go check on the latest test jet Tony's building, then grab some real expensive popcorn from the kitchen and watch _Die Hard_ movies until I can't see. You comin'?"

He is.


End file.
